Though burdened with unnecessary data (on, for instance, the distribution of Groves’s West Point classmates through various...
An overly detailed but useful biography of an unacknowledged founding father of the nuclear era.
Leslie Groves, a spit-and-polish West Pointer with a zeal for efficiency and secrecy, was just the right choice to head the Manhattan Project, to judge by Norris’s (Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, not reviewed) account. Having been one of the lead engineers responsible for building the Pentagon, he knew all about marshalling vast resources and conflicting personalities, capabilities of which national security advisor Vannevar Bush was well aware when he convinced Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Groves to lead the then–most secretive project the government had ever undertaken. Bush explained, “there ought to be one officer, of fine technical qualifications, assigned to become utterly familiar with this whole matter,” but, writes Norris, the reason for putting an Army Corps of Engineers officer in charge of the Manhattan Project “was to hide the expenditures for the project within the corps’ massive budget.” As commander, Norris writes, Groves shared responsibility for the use of the atomic bomb on civilian targets in Japan, about which Groves had no qualms; adds Norris, that use was not a matter of if, but of when—a foregone conclusion once development of the atomic bomb began. Moreover, Groves set in place procedures designed to ensure secrecy and compartmentalize knowledge, so that one Los Alamos worker never quite knew what another was up to (procedures that current Los Alamos administrators might do well to adapt, given recent scandals there). Whatever his accomplishments, Groves was a martinet, as Norris shows; he managed to offend most of the scientists, officers, and politicians with whom he came into contact, and he ended his days as a right-wing ideologue convinced that the government was full of “deep-dyed Reds,” “pink Reds,” and “little shades of pink.”
Though burdened with unnecessary data (on, for instance, the distribution of Groves’s West Point classmates through various corps of the Army), Norris’s narrative is of much use to students of the atomic age.Pub Date: April 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58642-039-9
Page Count: 727
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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